A Glorious Mess

As I search for titles to include in my Don Quixote film series, I finally got around to watching the Orson Welles version. I suspect it's one of the great might-have-beens in film history. It was famously never finished, in fact, there seem to be questions about whether it was ever meant to be finished. Welles worked on it intermittently for decades; Spanish filmmakers Jesús Franco and Patxi Irigoyen cobbled together this version in 1992, seven years after Welles's death.

The result is sometimes jarring. In the English-language version that I watched sometimes the characters' voices are dubbed by different actors within the same scene. The film gets repetitive at times, some scenes go on far longer than they need to, and great stretches of the film feel more like scattered clips from Welles's home movies than a coherent whole.

However, despite its messiness there are glimpses of something wonderful. Welles sets the film in modern Spain, so not only do we get windmills, we also get to see Don Quixote, played by a gaunt Francisco Reiguera, attempt to liberate a protesting woman from the Vespa that has captured her. The first hour, in fact, is very funny. Quixote gets carried away by his flights of fancy, while Sancho, played by Akim Tamiroff, trails behind not quite knowing what to make of this madman. In the second hour it becomes clear that Sancho is the real star of this show; Don Quixote is a somewhat static myth while Sancho, in Welles's telling, is a "character."

What I really enjoyed about this film is that even in its fractured state it's the only Don Quixote adaptation I've seen that does real justice to the metafictional frame. Orson Welles pops up occasionally as a filmmaker named Orson Welles who is making an adaptation of Don Quixote. At one point Sancho gets a part as an extra in Welles's film. So Welles essentially becomes the voice of Cide Hamete Benengeli. The possibilities of this arrangement are delightful and were brought home to me in one of the never-ending scenes I complained of above. At one point Sancho is looking for Don Quixote on the midst of a town festival. As he stumbles among the spectators of a bullfight, more than one person dismisses him as crazy. We are watching a spectacle in which Sancho interacts with other people who dismiss him as mad, people who themselves are watching a spectacle that many other people would dismiss as mad. The question of madness and how to define it becomes impossible to ignore. And through it all the quixotic figure of Orson Welles smiles enigmatically as if to say "look what I've done."

The film, though, is nothing but a tease. A might have been. A mess. But a glorious one.